Another example of how preventative costs are much lower than punitive costs.

We need to get better at accepting evidence based fixes to our societal problems. In this case providing more treatment up front will reduce crime and the need for jails.

One way to increase access to care is to open more treatment facilities throughout the country. Existing facilities often operate at capacity because of limited funding, so that those who want treatment cannot always find help.

The authors found that an increase in the number of treatment facilities causes a reduction in both violent and financially-motivated crime. This is likely due toa combination of forces: reducing drug abuse can reduce violent behavior that is caused by particular drugs, as well as property crimes like theft committed to fund an addiction. Reducing demand for illegal drugs might also reduce violence associated with the illegal drug trade. The authors estimate that each additional treatment facility in a county reduces the social costs of crime in that county by $4.2 million per year. Annual costs of treatment in a facility are approximately $1.1 million, so the benefits far exceed the costs.

Drafting bills like the new healthcare bill in secret mean two things. Republicans know it’s wrong and they wish to obscure the involvement of special interests.

As they draft legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Senate Republican leaders are aiming to transform large sections of the American health care system without a single hearing on their bill and without a formal, open drafting session.
That has created an air of distrust and concern — on and off Capitol Hill, with Democrats but also with Republicans.

let’s go back to the world of individual insurance before the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act went into effect on Jan. 1, 2014. In that world, the primary source of profit for insurers was not providing better care so that patients stayed healthy, or negotiating better prices with hospitals and drug companies; it was their ability to avoid the sick and insure only the healthy. And insurers had three tools for doing so: denying coverage to the insured for any costs associated with pre-existing conditions; denying insurance entirely to sick people; and charging the sick much higher prices than the healthy, a practice called health underwriting.

More people are choosing high deductible insurance because they want to hold onto as much of their earnings as they can. Without this factor pressuring the market downward we are where we are with spiralling costs.

This article gets right to the point. The current setup of employer provided healthcare doesn’t work.

It doesn’t benefit workers and it doesn’t incentivize healthcare competition or savings. The writers’ plan is verbatim what we have been saying we need for years.

Get employers out of the business of providing health insurance. We wouldn’t tolerate them interceding in our auto or home owners insurance. Why are we tolerant of it here?

Most likely because NobodyisFlyingthePlane. We can’t see the direct mechanism between rising healthcare costs and falling wages. Single payer or tax incentives to cover rising costs aren’t the solution; they’re only patches.

A Kaiser Foundation report released in September explained that since 1999, health care premiums for employer-sponsored insurance programs have risen more than three times faster than wages. Today’s workers are paying an average of $18,000 for health insurance that covers fewer services each year, as employers shift costs to their employees through higher deductibles, co-payments and shares of premiums.